I’ve been overwhelmingly busy with trying to start an open-source focused IT company with literally zero financing (yeah, “fat chance” right?) so haven’t had much time to pay to elections lately.

Anyone familiar with my thoughts on geopolitics, economics and political philosophy can probably guess that I perceive a significant separation between the way that establishment political parties portray themselves and the actual policies they adhere to, the way people think and the available menu of parties to choose from, and the way Americanism as a political philosophy is taught through history and the way the situation stands today.

These weird couplings lead to incoherent policies, inventive ways to sell such incompatibilities in elections and then even more inventive ways for supporters of this or that politician to justify just why they favor this or that candidate, having been robbed of any logical foundation for decision.

The mental and even emotional agility required to follow, say, Mitt Romney’s (just to pick someone who is current and known) statements on just about anything tire me, and I’ve got a company to try to establish. And I’m not even in the US right now (Japan, currently).

A close friend of mine from my Special Forces days (which I may be returning to soon in the event my company fails… wahahaha!) met with me the other day and asked me what I thought of Ron Paul. I hadn’t heard of him, so I did what everyone does and asked the internet about it.

I subscribe to soft currency Chicago/Friedmanist style economics, Ron Paul is an Austrianist who believes in removing the Federal Reserve completely and returning to the gold standard. I believe the gold standard to be literally impossible to properly implement across the board, and since gold is a major economic commodity today I don’t find it reasonable to base a currency on it. From a practical perspective I don’t see the sense in taking it out of the ground in California at incredible expense only to put it back in the ground in New York or Kentucky. Or London or Tokyo for that matter. People need to trade, so they will trade. A soft currency provides a vehicle through which a farmer can trade cows for soccerballs without having to chop the cow into tiny pieces to buy a single soccer ball. Its a representative wealth vehicle. But it can be mismanaged. Bad management of fiscal policy, whether soft or hard, or even improper regulation of a derivative or certificate market system, can accelerate a boom-bust cycle which I perceive as somewhat inevitable, but exacerbated by mismanagement of policy (and absolutely, unsurvivably catastrophic when linked by society-wide regulatory systems like socialism or fascism).

The problem I see is that hard currencies can be just as easily mismanaged by government as soft currencies, and there is simply no silver bullet (no pun intended) to that situation other than simply removing government from the economic equation as much as possible — and this is the lynchpin of both my ideas and Ron Paul’s. Hard currencies have been abused throughout the ages, and soft currencies have as well. So I see hard VS soft as an issue of practicality and nothing more. I can argue convincingly that abuse of the system — whatever system that is — by government interference is the core problem and that must be the focus even more than any focus on a specific method of wealth conveyance.

Isolationism VS Non-Interventionism

Ron Paul is not an isolationist. He says so himself and he clearly doesn’t believe in that by its purest definition. I don’t believe in isolationism, either. I do believe in a slightly higher level of intervention and martial preparation than he may, however. In particular, he hasn’t had a chance to fully explain his position on recalling all foreign military bases, or even whether that’s what he really means. I don’t think a 100% elemination of all US bases from overseas is wise, specifically with regard to maintaining a global naval capacity. Maintaining a truly open maritime trade environment is what I’m really concerned about, not whether or not we continue to keep forward deployed American armor units in Germany, Poland or Turkey. There are other ways to maintain forward readiness that are cheaper and perhaps more responsible than what we’re doing today, and from a strict security-only perspective a strong navy is the only really critical part of our strategic posture (and I’m an ex-Army Green Beret saying that, not an ex-Navy whatever). When we go beyond that we start getting into really fuzzy discussions (“Well, if this one base in Japan is too important to do away with, why aren’t bases X, Y, and Z in Korea, Germany and England?” &tc.).

Having spent a lot of time in Congress and having heard deep national strategy discussions from time to time, I suspect Dr. Paul probably thinks the same things I do about foreign policy and simply doesn’t have time to get into it during political debates in campaign season. The fact that he could argue reason based on a studied position on these issues, however, defines a significant separation between him and the rest of the politicians from all parties — and that is what scares me a bit.

And that brings me to why the media is shutting him out — including the people who should love this guy at first look: Fox News. The problem with Ron Paul is that he’s really frightening to the establishment. Any establishment. Once an establishment gets large enough it magically gets in bed with government in America, and that is more representative of the fact that we don’t quite really have capitalism in America; not nearly how it was intended to work anyway. The amount of money that is wrapped up in ties to government is only increasing, and that means that large establishments tend to be more reliant on government as time passes, which means that any and all large establishments, whether politically Right or Left (which I don’t believe to be accurate labels any longer) are threatened by ideas like Ron Paul’s. When you hear “the budget went up” it went somewhere, usually to contracted arrangements to federal employee budgets, most of which are not specifically authorized by the Constitution.

Dr. Paul is right about nearly everything I’ve heard him speak on, and the other candidates aren’t really saying much of anything. Its almost like George Friedman, Milton Friedman (no relation), and Ayn Rand got together to run for President — but its just one guy.

If you haven’t made the time to pay attention to the elections because they “just don’t matter” (which is the attitude I was taking until last week) please look Ron Paul up. Listen to some of the things he has to say and the things he has written over the last several decades in office. He knows what he’s talking about and hasn’t changed his story since he was initially elected 12 terms ago. That’s truly amazing in politics in any era.

If my friend happens to read this, I suppose he’ll know what I wound up thinking about Ron Paul.